Anger is a great force. If you control it, it can be transmuted into a power which can move the whole world--William Shenstone

29 September 2006

Nature Calls

So here i am, taking heavy meds-trying to get to sleep in relative comfort. Nothing is kicking in so I pick up the most recent book and start reading. Oh...inspiration. A passage so profound and beautiful that I have to get up and share. A bit long perhaps but worth it.

The Joy of Next

If you were asked to name the human brain's greatest achievement, you might think first of the impressive artifacts is has produced-the Great Pyramid of Giza, the International Space Station, or perhaps the Golden Gate Bridge. These are great achievements indeed, and our brains deserve their very ow ticker-tape parade for producing them. But they are not the greatest. A sophisticated machine could design and build any one of these things because designing and building require knowledge, logic and patience, of which sophisticated machines have plenty. In fact, there is really only one achievement so remarkable that even the most sophisticated machine cannot pretend to have accomplished it, and that achievement is conscious experience. Seeing the Great Pyramid or remembering the Golden Gate Bridge or imagining the Space Station are far more remarkable acts than is building any one of them. What's more, one of these remarkable acts is even more remarkable than the others. To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was but to imagine-ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be.